Balloons may not be the only Chinese technology spying on Americans in plain sight, as a new report warned of state-approved “rolling surveillance devices.”
Considered a Manchurian candidate in more ways than one, President Joe Biden and his administration have often tangled on issues related to American security and the Chinese Communist Party. Whether it's land grabs near military bases, mixed messages on social media platform TikTok, or a mismanaged response to spy balloons criss-crossing the country, self-driving cars easily made the list of threats that have turned the streets of California into “literally the wild, wild west…”
Monday, at report of Fortune analyzed data collected from the Department of Motor Vehicles and concluded that, as of 2017, self-driving cars had logged more than 1.8 million miles in the Golden State alone.
They also detailed that of the fleets equipped with cameras and geospatial maps that roam the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose, seven of the 35 companies approved to test self-driving capabilities in California were headquartered entirely or partially in China, and some had obtained permission to test in Arizona and Texas.
Apollo, AutoX, DiDi Research America, Pony.ai and WeRide had all operated their cars in California through 2023 without significant regulatory disruption to prevent US data from ending up in the hands of the Chinese government or the highest bidder.
“It's literally the wild, wild west here. There's nobody in charge,” said Craig Singleton, director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' China program.
Fortune detailed: “The lack of safeguards raises concerns not only about the vast amount of data self-driving cars collect in the normal course of their operations, but also about the ability of roaming vehicles to surreptitiously collect other types of data.” .
“The potential for this evil was demonstrated in 2010 when Google acknowledged that its manually driven Street View mapping cars had for years collected users' private data, including email communications and full passwords, shared over unsecured Wi-Fi networks by residents in more than 30 countries (Google blamed the incident on a rogue employee),” the report recalled.
Meanwhile, China has maintained restrictions on US companies conducting similar tests in the communist nation with Elon Musk's Tesla. as reported approve data security requirements in April.
That same month, automotive expert Mike Caudill suggested Americans should “be absolutely concerned” about the technology in these vehicles.
“You have your smartphone. Smartphones are being integrated into vehicles. And so the problematic nature of that is data,” he told Fox News Digital. “And the content is being shared between your phone and the vehicle itself. And obviously when you're talking about electric vehicles, they're even more high-tech. They require more data. They require more communication.”
“And the question is, who receives this data? Is it the CCP? Is it the government?” Caudill raised.
“In the defense domain,” Hudson Institute senior fellow Nadia Schadlow told Fortune, “understanding your terrain and the granularity of your terrain is critical. It's a competition about who has full awareness of the situation on the battlefield”.
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